Welcome to 2010 !

Hello All and thank you for visiting this blog so far…
In this post I’ll summarize LGN Blog States, talk a little about the games that were released this year and make predictions for the future to come…

As you can see from the graph below LGN blog is becoming more popular each month (except for the month that I went to Prague for vacation), it started with 1,952 visits and last month LGN had 9,760 visits (not including myself), so there is always a record to beat.

The most popular post was “Upcoming GNU/Linux games !” (which LGN is all about, see it as the main theme of the blog), not so far behind was “Interview With Frictional Games – Amnesia” with a great help from external websites that linked to me (thanks people !), and the third place was reserved for “Recently Released”.
All of those posts where viewed more then 1,000 times !

The most popular links from LGN where to FreeGamer (count it as the other side of the coin, I mostly talk about proprietary games, and they talk about as much as important FOSS games).
The other websites where gamingonlinux and the upcoming Aquaria from Bit-Blot which got heavy interest.

This is the place where I say BIG THANKS to all the websites that linked to LGN !
The most visits came from Ubuntuforums.org (yeah I use Ubuntu 64-bit at home, but I use RHEL5 at work).
Basilisk Games, the developers of the Eschalon series also linked to our interview (which took the forth place by views) and boost the visits to LGN.
Frictional Games the developers of the Penumbra series did the same and linked to our interview on their upcoming game Amnesia and made many people very happy)

The most “searchers” that came to LGN searched for “torchlight linux” , due to the small campaign I’ve started here and there they found themselves here.
111 people searched for “linux gaming news” to get here – which is 100% what they wanted.
The third place took the “upcoming linux game postal 3″ quarry, sadly as a Postal fan, except a few interviews Postal3 doesn’t have an official “stand alone” website and not much info about it – but it will definitely find it’s way to GNU/Linux .

Search Terms for all days ending 2010-01-03 (Summarized)

All Time

Search

Views

torchlight linux

262

linux gaming news

111

upcoming linux game postal 3

40

venetica linux

28

deathspank linux

28

ogre games linux

26

primal carnage

26

torchlight on linux

24

lgn hardcore

21

upcoming linux games

19

torchlight for linux

19

linux torchlight

17

linux gaming

15

linux news

14

brink linux

14

unreal 3 linux client

14

zblood

13

amnesia the dark descent

13

natural selection 2 linux

13

the legend of crystal valley linux

12

linux rpg games

12

indie developers who developed linux cli

12

mystic mine review

12

torchlight game linux

11

lgn linux

11

syndicate online

10

aquaria linux

10

linux hardcore gaming

10

gnu games

10

eschalon book 2

9

linux game news

9

linux games hardcore

9

crpg

8

primal carnage linux

8

horror fps

8

linux game hardcore

7

action rpg linux

7

linux action rpg

7

aquaria-beta-installer.run

6

hardcore linux gaming

6

sci-fi mmorpg

6

legend of crystal valley linux

6

linux games in development

6

irukandji shooter

6

linux games december 2009

6

jets'n'guns linux

6

maxim linux gaming

6

thearrel mckinney

6

torchlight linux client

5

deathspank for linux

5

Generated 2010-01-03 16:56:40 UTC+3

On this note I would like to inform UbuntuForums visitors that I will no longer going to “popup” the LGN thread with updates (IF I’ll make the updates they will be only on the first post of the thread), I will however going to replay to questions/interesting posts.
So if you don’t see the LGN thread on the front page, it doesn’t mean the blog wasn’t updated.
You can bookmark LGN : http://lgn.linux-hardcore.com
Or follow it with RSS feeder : http://feeds.feedburner.com/LinuxGamingNews

2009 was a good year for GNU/Linux gaming, many games were released and some like : World Of Goo, Sacred Gold, HoN (beta) and the Shadowgrounds series became instant hits !
GNU/Linux gamers sure know how to support the developers/porters – from the interviews I’ve done a “GNU/Linux Desktop Market Share of 1% (according to *some* sources, which I disagree with – but we have no other estimation so I’ll stick with this number for now) accounts for 10%-20% and even more in some cases of game sales that offer ports to GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS ! (which are mostly the indies, THANKS INDIES)
That’s an astonishing number by all means.

The future seems brighter then ever (well till end of 2012 anyways), and more and more games are being ported to GNU/Linux thanks to our game porters and indie game developers.
The most anticipated game by me Age Of The Decadence *should* be released by the end of 2010.
Eschalon: Book II should be released in a few months.
Many other indie’s are close to finish their games, and LGP have yet to disclosed the ports they are working on.

Thanks again for everyone who helped LGN and Gaming on GNU/Linux
And stay tuned for a wonderful year !

I was a wee bit disappointed that I did not see Wikipedia in the list of sites that linked to you though, as I have been seeding it into articles over there as well. I probably account for a good percentage of the Linux gaming coverage over there, and have had to fight for it on occasion. Thank you for giving me something to write up about!

Maxim Bardin
January 7, 2010 11:21 pm

Hello Hamish Wilson.

If it was my call I would use Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora or CentOS at work – but not RHEL.
We only use RHEL because of it’s name in the world, we can’t get the same respect from our clients if we tell them our product runs on CentOS, which is just the same thing as RHEL but without the Trademarks.

There were in fact several Wikipedia articles linking to LGN (but I suspect they didn’t show up on those tables because it there were a very few hits).
The Brink wiki article brought a lot of people to LGN.

Thank you for supporting LGN and the GNU/Linux community.
Keep the good work.

Maxim Bardin
January 7, 2010 11:23 pm

@Max

I’ve sent a few interviews and waiting for the “results”, and another interview is in progress.

Thank you for your comment.

Patrick
January 8, 2010 11:13 pm

I’m waiting for LGPs next announcement. As far as I know they’ve got (at least) five games in development at the moment. I’m really curious which games they’re working on.

Maxim Bardin
January 9, 2010 2:59 pm

Indeed LGP is currently working on 5 titles, but 2 of them were already announced long time ago :
1. Disciples 2: Dark Prophecy
2. Bandits: Phoenix Rising

Then you are left with 3 unannounced titles.
My guess is that one of those titles will be Sacred2 + exp …but it’s just a wild guess…
We need more cRPG’s on GNU/Linux.